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Drilling process causes water supply alarm

By Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica

Posted:
11/17/2008 12:30:00 AM MST

Updated:
11/17/2008 11:33:14 AM MST

A frozen "waterfall" of drilling fluids was visible near Parachute in February. The state says 1.6 million gallons of fracturing fluids leaked from a pit and ended up seeping out of the cliff.
(Colorado Department of Natural Resources
)

In July, a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wyo., and pulled up a load of brown, oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people.

The results sent shock waves through the energy industry and state and federal regulatory agencies.

Sublette County is the home of one of the nation's largest natural-gas fields, and many of its 6,000 wells have undergone a process pioneered by Halliburton called hydraulic fracturing, which shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release the gas.

More information

Visit: ProPublica.org's website for much more on the water safety story, including a slide show explanation of the hydraulic fracturing process in Wyoming, extensive documents, and links for more information..

The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. After that study, Congress even exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Today, fracturing is used in nine of every 10 natural-gas wells in the United States.

Over the last few years, however, a series of contamination incidents has raised questions about that EPA study and ignited a debate over whether the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may threaten the nation's increasingly precious drinking-water supply.

An investigation by ProPublica found that water contamination in drilling areas around the country is far more prevalent than the EPA asserts.

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This investigation also found that the 2004 EPA study was not as conclusive as it claimed to be. A close review shows that the body of the study contains damaging information that wasn't mentioned in the conclusion. In fact, the study foreshadowed many of the problems now being reported across the country.

An exploding house

The contamination in Sublette County is significant because it is the first to be documented by a federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

But more than 1,000 other cases of contamination have been documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In one case, a house exploded after hydraulic fracturing created underground passageways and methane seeped into the residential water supply. In other cases, the contamination occurred not from actual drilling below ground but on the surface, where accidental spills and leaky tanks, trucks and waste pits allowed benzene and other chemicals to leach into streams, springs and water wells.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of each contamination or measure its spread accurately because the precise nature and concentrations of the chemicals used by industry are considered trade secrets. Not even the EPA knows exactly what's in the drilling fluids. And that, EPA scientists say, makes it impossible to vouch for the safety of the drilling process or precisely track its effects.

"I am looking more and more at water-quality issues . . . because of a growing concern," said Joyel Dhieux, a drilling-field inspector who handles environmental review at the EPA's Denver regional offices. "But if you don't know what's in it, I don't think it's possible."

Of the 300-odd compounds that private researchers and the BLM suspect are being used, 65 are listed as hazardous by the federal government. Many of the rest are unstudied and unregulated.

Industry representatives maintain that the drilling fluids are mostly made up of nontoxic, even edible, substances and that when chemicals are used, they are a tiny fraction of the overall mix. They say some information is already available and that releasing specific details would only frighten and confuse the public and would come at great expense to the industry's competitive business.

Thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing, natural-gas drilling has vastly expanded across the United States. In 2007, there were 449,000 gas wells in 32 states, 30 percent more than in 2000. By 2012, the nation could be drilling 32,000 new wells a year.

State regulators and environmentalists have begun pressing the gas industry to disclose the chemicals it uses and urging Congress to revisit the environmental exemptions hydraulic fracturing currently enjoys.

But in the meantime, the drilling continues.

Samples couldn't be taken

In September, the BLM approved plans for 4,400 new wells in Sublette County, despite the unresolved water issues. Tests there showed contamination in 88 of the 220 wells examined, and the plume stretched over 28 miles. When researchers returned to take more samples, they couldn't even open the water wells; monitors showed they contained so much flammable gas that they were likely to explode.

Other signs of contamination were also worrying residents. Independent tests in several private drinking wells adjacent to the anticline drilling showed fluoride — which is listed in Halliburton's hydraulic-fracturing pat ent applications and can cause bone damage at high levels — at almost three times the EPA's maximum limit.

On federal land, which is where most of the Sublette County wells are located, the BLM governs leasing and permitting for gas development, with secondary oversight from the state and only advisory input from the EPA. When the contaminated-water results were first reported, the BLM and the state downplayed their significance.

The EPA's regional office in Denver sharply disagreed. But because it has only an advisory role in the federal review process, and hydraulic fracturing is exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act, there was little the EPA could do.

It rebuked the BLM in a strongly worded letter and recommended that the project be stopped until further scientific study could be done. The BLM, backed by a powerful business lobby, ignored that recommendation.

The 2004 EPA study is routinely used to dismiss complaints that hydraulic-fracturing fluids might be responsible for the water problems in places like Pinedale, the nearest town to the Sublette County gas field. The study concluded that hydraulic fracturing posed "no threat" to underground drinking water because fracturing fluids aren't necessarily hazardous and can't travel far underground, and that there is "no unequivocal evidence" of a health risk.

But documents obtained by ProPublica show that the EPA negotiated directly with the gas industry before finalizing those conclusions and then ignored evidence that fracking might cause the kinds of water problems now being recorded in drilling states.

Buried deep within the 424-page report are statements explaining that fluids migrated unpredictably and that some of the chemicals involved "can cause kidney, liver, heart, blood, and brain damage through prolonged or repeated exposure."

Study was limited in scope

One of the report's three main authors, Jeffrey Jollie, an EPA hydrogeologist, cautions that the research has been misconstrued by industry. The study didn't consider the impact of above-ground drilling or of drilling in geologic formations deep underground, where many of the large new gas reserves are being developed.

"It was never intended to be a broad, sweeping study," Jollie says.

Nevertheless, a few months after the report's release, the sweeping 2005 Energy Policy Act was passed. Almost no attention was paid to the three paragraphs that stripped the federal government of most of its authority to monitor and regulate hydraulic fracturing's impact on the environment. By default, that responsibility would now fall to the states.

"That pretty much closed the door," said Greg Oberley, an EPA groundwater specialist working in the Western drilling states. "So we absolutely do not look at fracking ... under the Safe Drinking Water Act. It's not done."

Much of what is known about the makeup of drilling fluids comes from the personal investigations of Theo Colborn, an independent Colorado-based scientist who specializes in low-dose effects of chemicals on human health.

Among Colborn's list of nearly 300 chemicals is a clear, odorless surfactant called 2-BE, used in foaming agents to lubricate the flow of fracking fluids. Colborn told Congress in 2007 that it can cause adrenal tumors.

Laura Amos, who suffered from such a tumor, pressed the drilling firm EnCana on whether the compound had been used to fracture the well near her house near Dry Hollow. Her family's drinking well had exploded like a geyser April 30, 2001. For months, the company denied 2-BE had been used. But Amos persisted. In January 2005, her lawyers obtained documents from EnCana showing that 2-BE had, in fact, been used in at least one adjacent well.

In 2006, Amos accepted a reported multimillion-dollar settlement from EnCana. The company was fined $266,000 for "failure to protect water-bearing formations." Yet investigators also concluded, without further explanation, that hydraulic fracturing was not to blame.

In the past 12 months, a flurry of documented incidents have become hard to dismiss.

In February, a frozen 200-foot waterfall was discovered on the side of a massive cliff near Parachute. According to the state, 1.6 million gallons of fracturing fluids had leaked from a waste pit and been transported by groundwater, where it seeped out of the cliff.

In a separate incident nearby in June, benzene was discovered in a place called Rock Spring. Three weeks later, a rancher was hospitalized after he drank well water out of his own tap.

Colorado state records show more than 1,500 spills since 2003, in which time the rate of drilling increased 50 percent. In 2008 alone, records show more than 206 spills, 48 relating to water contamination.

State regulators and Washington lawmakers are increasingly impatient with voluntary measures and are seeking to toughen their oversight. Last year, Colorado began a rewrite of its regulations, including a proposal to require companies to disclose the exact makeup of their fracking fluids.

In August, the industry struck a compromise by agreeing to reveal the chemicals in fracturing fluids to health officials and regulators — but the agreement applies only to chemicals stored in 50-gallon drums or larger. As a practical matter, drilling workers in Colorado and Wyoming said in interviews, the fluids are often kept in smaller quantities. That means at least some of the ingredients won't be disclosed.

"They'll never get it," says Bruce Baizel, a Colorado attorney with the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, about the state's quest for information. "Not unless they are willing to go through a lawsuit."

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